Monthly Archives: October 2010
No Nanowrimo for me this year
| October 22, 2010 | Posted by annathepiper under Lament of the Dove, Nanowrimo |
|
Because I’m in crunch mode at work and that’s likely to overlap at least a little into the beginning of the month, and also, because beating Lament of the Dove into proper shape for re-submission to Carina Press is of highest priority for me and the writings right now.
‘Sides, you guys wouldn’t want me to disappoint Julian and Kestar and Faanshi. Especially Kestar. I mean geez, the man’s got a face as earnest as the day is long. I couldn’t possibly make that face unhappy. And given what I’m doing to poor Julian at the end of the book, he’s going to be really cranky at me if I don’t get him to the beginning of Book 2 as quickly as possible. ;>
Good luck to all who will be doing Nano, though! I’m likely to be going just as spare as you guys during the month of November, so I’m with you in spirit!
Dorchester continuing to implode
| October 20, 2010 | Posted by annathepiper under Other People's Books, Publishing |
|
I suspect that many of you who’ll see this post are already following the fine ladies at Smart Bitches Trashy Books. But in case you aren’t, SB Sarah put up this post today with the last round of what’s been an ongoing saga of WTF from Dorchester, a romance publisher that’s been in severe financial straits.
Dorchester’s been handling this in very strange ways, and the latest round of it is quite alarming, especially if you happen to be an author: many Dorchester authors haven’t been paid royalties for their titles for years now, and others are beginning to report that despite the fact that rights for their works have reverted to them, Dorchester is continuing to digitally sell them as well as offer them for free as Kindle downloads.
This is unacceptable. So if you’re a romance reader, please be on the lookout for Dorchester titles, and avoid buying them if you can. (SB Sarah provides links off to other posts about the topic, and the affected authors she mentions are posting in the comments, asking readers to refrain from buying the freely offered books and instead sit tight until they can provide digital copies that they’re selling themselves.)
Lament of the Dove status report
| October 17, 2010 | Posted by annathepiper under Lament of the Dove |
|
Y’all know how I mentioned the scene at the beginning of Chapter 15 was destined to die? Well, I killed it–and added in a bit of extra content in the new first scene of the chapter, tying a bit more in to how the previous one closed. This means that all told I’ve killed nearly 2,000 words from this one chapter alone.
And that’ll do me for now with this chapter, I think. I’ll be moving on to Chapter 16 as of tomorrow night to see what I can do to it. Now I’m moving out of the rough middle stretch into where the editor was saying the pacing started working better for her, but I’m still on the Word Count Reduction mission. So we’ll see how many more words I can kill in the remaining chapters. (Of which there are nine, since I’ll also be punting the epilogue over into the second book.)
As of tonight’s efforts I’ve killed 7,346 words total from the draft, and of the words killed, big chunks of them were in that one scene in this very chapter. (As well as shorter interstitial sorts of scenes in the last couple ones as well.) The total word count is down to 111,012. I think I’m on good track to kill 10K total out of this draft, which is smack dab in the target range.
This does not suck.
Quick beta reading update
| October 11, 2010 | Posted by annathepiper under Lament of the Dove |
|
Beta readers who aren’t done looking at Lament of the Dove yet, just so y’all know, the Great Word Count Reduction Pass (read: the fifth draft) is currently on Chapter 15. It’ll be a bit yet before I finish so you still have time to get me your feedback. If you feel hard-pressed for time, please do keep in mind that I do not require a hardcore copyedit pass! Most of the things I’m asking y’all to look for are bigger picture stuff. Feel free to focus on those questions if you are busy.
I wanted to do a post though to cover some of the overall issues I’ve already heard back on. To wit…
Housekeeping, and a Bone Walker blurb
| October 2, 2010 | Posted by annathepiper under Bone Walker, Housekeeping |
I got tired of looking at the same theme over and over again, and after a lot of failed attempts to find a new one I liked, I finally settled today on “2010 Weaver”, a child theme of the Twenty Ten default theme that came with WordPress 3.0. The big reason I chose this theme was to take advantage of the ability of WP 3 to do menus–and as you can see if you look at the site (or if you click through off of the LJ or DW versions of this post), I’ve got a fully functioning menu now.
Spent much of this afternoon setting that up and tweaking a bunch of the settings to get it the way I wanted it. Along with twiddling the theme, I also took the time to sweep through all the pages on the site and update them as best I could, so at this point everything should be current. Most notably, I’ve spun off separate sub-pages for both Faerie Blood and Defiance, on the assumption that if I keep selling material, more of my books will want their own sub-pages. I fleshed out each of these new pages with a bit of an excerpt as well.
And, I updated the In Progress page with a current working version of the blurb for Bone Walker! Here it is:
Two months after the rising of her faerie blood and magic, Kendis Thompson thinks she’s starting to get the hang of her altered life. Along with her boyfriend Christopher MacSimidh, she’s learning magic from Millicent, the senior Warder of Seattle. Christopher’s taking to his long-denied Warder power, and all in all, the two are happily pursuing their relationship.
But nogitsune are prowling the city, on the hunt for a fugitive child with powers of her own–and the Unseelie bard Elessir has escaped from his vengeful queen, bringing with him a curse that lashes out to endanger Kendis’ closest friend. Now she must confront these dual threats to her city and her loved ones, along with the uncomfortable truth that there’s much more to her Seelie heritage than she knows.
It’s only a working draft of a blurb, but hey, it’s an incomplete working draft of a novel, so that’s all good. Hope it piques your interest, folks!
Aether Age anthology and Hadley Rille 5K contest!
| October 2, 2010 | Posted by annathepiper under Contests |
I just mentioned this on my personal blog, but it’s worth mentioning here: my fellow Outer Alliance member Brandon Bell is the editor of what promises to be a fun anthology, The Aether Age: Helios. You should go over and pre-order it, not only because it sounds fun, but also because its publisher, Hadley Rille Books, is having a contest to try to reach their goal of selling 5,000 books!
They’ll be giving away a Kindle 3G in January to a randomly selected entrant. You can sign up according to the instructions here, and you can get additional entries in the contest if you pre-order the aforementioned anthology or order anything else in their catalog. I just got emailed by one of their staff as well who says he’ll give me another entry for spreading the word, so I encourage interested parties to consider doing the same.
Because hey, books are shiny, and so are Kindles. Go to, folks! 
Recent Comments